With their dark, heavy robes and beaked masks, the plague doctor will forever be associated with the bubonic plague, even though they first appeared in France and Italy in the 1600s, nearly 300 years after the Black Death ripped through Europe and killed up to 60 percent of the continent's people. But just because we have made advances in science, doesn't mean we aren't prone to some of the same superstitions and modes of thinking that accompanied earlier plagues and pandemics. This is, without a doubt, an improvement on the past. Using terms like "social distancing" and "self-quarantine," our reaction to COVID-19 is defined in relation to a connected humanity, where the best way to address a disease is to retract from the social network that spreads COVID-19. Rather than the Greek's pursuit of internal balance, inspired by hydraulics, we think of the coronavirus in ways appropriate for the social media age. One beneficial expression of this can be seen in how we react to the novel coronavirus, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic spreading through 157 countries. We have better information, which can lead researchers to vaccines instead of new methods of bloodletting, but our perspectives are still colored by culture and how we interpret our place in the world. While the advent of the germ theory of disease has advanced our understanding and our ability to treat diseases, we are not always more rational in how we choose, as individuals, to respond. His point is simple: how we name and describe disease, and the idiom in which we understand them, affect how the disease is understood and how its sufferers are treated. In illness, this balance was upset by the excess of one fluid." "In the normal body, these four fluids were held in perfect, if somewhat precarious, balance. To explain illness-all illness-Hippocrates fashioned an elaborate doctrine based on fluids and volumes, which he freely applied to pneumonia, boils, dysentery, and hemorrhoids," Mukherjee writes. "This preoccupation with hydraulics also flowed into Greek medicine and pathology. In The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee describes the Greeks preoccupation with fluid mechanics, spurred by a "revolution" in irrigation and "culminating with Archaemedes discovering his eponymous laws in his bathtub." built on the best science (or natural philosophy) available, systematized in the idiom of the day's most cutting edge technology: hydraulics. While it may seem silly today, when Hippocrates defined the four humors-blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm-the Greek physician of the fourth century B.C.
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